Tomorrow's ghost

that infinite distance.

That's quite all right. Sir Frederick.' But that was a lie, and a palpable lie too, in spite of the cool voice she could hear like an answering tape played back to her: if he knew anything he must know that she was surprised half out of her wits at his sudden appearance out of the dark in her back garden, away from his own proper setting which was as much part of him as was the heavy gilded frame a part of the portrait which hung above the fireplace in his office. And, Christ! If it had been old Admiral Hall himself who had stepped out of the darkness with a polite 'Mrs Fitzgibbon' on his lips she would have been hardly more disconcerted!

A lie, then - to be qualified into a half-truth at the least.

'I didn't recognise your voice for a moment, though,' said the coolly taped voice, her own voice.

Well, that was closer to the truth, because in the four years - or nearly four years -

that she had worked for him he had hardly spoken to her four times directly; when she had been Group Captain Roskill's secretary the year before those nearly-four-years, carrying and fetching between them, he had talked to her more often than that, and smiled at her too.

As he was smiling at her now, if she was reading the shadow-lines on his face correctly in the feeble light of her own torch; but this time the smile frightened her, shaking her torch-hand so that the other shadows danced and crowded round behind him, like the uninvited ghosts from her own past whom he had disturbed - Robbie and Mrs Robert Fitzgibbon, and Frances Warren (Upper Sixth), and even the new half-ghost of Marilyn Francis which she had been trying to exorcise in the incinerator.

She didn't want him to smile at her, because whatever had brought him here could not be a smiling matter, but she couldn't turn off the smile.

'In the circumstances that's hardly surprising.' He chuckled briefly, and the sound seemed to her as far from amusement as the shadow-smile had been. 'For a moment I hardly recognised you, my dear Frances. They've made you blonde again - and frizzed your hair. And you're wearing those contact lenses, of course.' He nodded as though he could still see her clearly. 'Well ... I wouldn't quarrel with the lenses, but I can't say I like your hair that way.'

'No?' She put her hand involuntarily to her head,

which she had forgotten was still outwardly Marilyn's. 'Well, I can't say that I like it much either. Sir Frederick, to be honest.'

Or not to be honest, as the case might be, the still-unexorcised Marilyn whispered in her inner ear; and that involuntary gesture had been pure Marilyn, too. A dead give-away, in spite of the cool Frances-voice.

She switched off her own torch, enveloping them both in total darkness, and for a moment total silence also.

'Ye-es ... But it was entirely right for British-American at the time, nevertheless, as I recall now. And as I'm sure you appreciated very well. That is to say, you understood...'

He trailed off, as though the related subjects of her appearance and her assignment in British-American were of no great interest to him any more. 'What an absolutely marvellous night-sky you have out here in the country! You know, we have nothing like this in central London, or very rarely - galaxies like grains of sand - and I cannot help thinking that it's a bad thing for us Londoners ... The stars ... without them one is inclined to lose one's sense of ... not proportion so much as insignificance, I suspect -

wouldn't you say?'

Insignificance?

Was entirely right for British-American at the time.

A statement of fact - was: with that he eliminated the possibility that she had been taken off British-American because of some mere administrative stupidity. He knew all about that, just as he knew all about her, and all this was as near to an apology for seeming to push her around as he could bring himself to make.

Away in the far distance, beyond the immediate circles of darkness and silence which surrounded them both, she could hear the faint drone and snarl of cars jockeying for position on the long pull up Hammond's Hill on the motorway. And she fancied that if she listened carefully enough she ought to be able to hear the computer-whine of her own brain merging the non-information she possessed already with the non-information he had just given her, and, more than that, adding to it his presence here now - a very large and significant mountain come uninvited to a very small and insignificant Mohammed.

* * *

After the bomb there had been Colonel Butler -

'Thank you, Mrs Fitzgibbon ... Well, there's nothing more you can usefully do here, so you'd best go home, and I'll call you if I need you ... When Mitchell has seen the Minister off he'll give you one of the cars.'

* * *

He was good, was Colonel Butler, she had decided at that point, observing him control the ant-heap confusion without fuss, without raising his voice, without a nuance of I-told-you-so: it had been like watching a re-enactment of Kipling's

If

by one quiet, ugly-handsome, totally decisive man who somehow made the time and had exactly the right word of reassurance or encouragement or command for everyone, from the slightly panicky ministerial security officer, whose minister had been whisked away from him by Paul Mitchell, to a Jock Maitland drenched with muddy water and plastered with feathers and flying duck entrails but still - or even more - dourly and gloriously Scottish -

* * *

'- ye wain night, sairr - and a lateral charge too, of aboot six poounds ... But that doesna'